It is a difficult question whether the serial principle permits us to draw sharp lines of demarcation between the percept and the near anticipation, or say the antecept, and between the percept and the recent memory (may I be permitted to call this the ponecept, a distant and dubious memory being perhaps quite another thing?), or whether the percept is at once but an extreme case of an antecept and an extreme case of a ponecept.

It is a difficult question whether the serial principle permits us to draw sharp lines of demarcation between the percept and the near anticipation, or say the antecept, and between the percept and the recent memory (may I be permitted to call this the ponecept, a distant and dubious memory being perhaps quite another thing?), or whether the percept is at once but an extreme case of an antecept and an extreme case of a ponecept. Or rather, – I beg the reader’s pardon for my awkwardness of statement, – the precise question is not about percept, antecept, and ponecept, but about percipuum, antecipuum, and ponecipuum, the direct and uncontrollable interpretations of percept, antecept, and ponecept.

But in science instinct can play but a secondary rôle. The reason of this is that our instincts are adapted to the continuance of the race and thus to individual life. But science has an indefinite future before it; and what it aims at is to gain the greatest possible advance in knowledge in five centuries or ten. Instinct not being adapted to this purpose, the methods of science must be artificial. As Professor Trowbridge hints, pure science has nothing to do with belief. What I believe is what I am prepared to go on today. Imagine a general besieging a city. He sits in his tent at night preparing the details of his plan of action for the morrow. He finds that what his orders ought to be and perhaps the whole fate of his army depend upon a certain question of topography concerning which he is in need of information. He sends for his best engineer officer, – a highly scientific man, – and asks how he is to ascertain the fact in question. The officer replies, “There is only one possible way of ascertaining that. So and so must be done.” “How long will that take?” “Two or three months.” The general dismisses the man of science, – as Napoleon dismissed Laplace, – and sends for another officer, not half so scientific, but good at guessing. What this officer shall say, the general will go by. He will adopt it as his belief.

…two utterly different kinds of elements go to compose any percept. In the first place, there are the qualities of feeling or sensation, each of which is something positive and sui generis, being such as it is quite regardless of how or what anything else is. On account of this self-sufficiency, it is convenient to call these the elements of “Firstness.” In the percept, these elements of Firstness are perceived to be connected in definite ways. A visual percept of a chair has a definite shape. If it is yellow with a green cushion, that is quite different from being green with a yellow cushion. These connectives are directly perceived, and the perception of each of them is a perception at once of two opposed objects, – a double awareness. In respect to each of these connections, one part of the percept appears as it does relatively to a second part. Hence, it is convenient to call them elements of “Secondness.” The vividness with which a percept stands out is an element of secondness; because the percept is vivid in proportion to the intensity of its effect upon the perceiver. These elements of secondness bring with them the peculiar singleness of the percept. This singleness consists in a double definiteness. For on the one hand, the percept contains no blank gaps which, in representing it, we are free to fill as we like. What I mean will be seen if we consider any knowledge we can have of the future. I heard somebody say that the Brooklyn bridge would fall some day. The only way in which he could even think he knew that would be by knowing that any bridge I might select that should be constructed in a certain way would fall. There is no such universality about the percept. It is quite individual. On the other hand, the definiteness of the percept is of a perfectly explicit kind. In any knowledge of the past something is, as it were, held in reserve. There is an indicated gap which we are not free to fill but which further information may fill. We know that the Sphinx was made by some king of Egypt. But what one? The percept, however, exhibits itself in full. These two kinds of definiteness, first, that the percept offers no range of freedom to anybody who may undertake to represent it, and secondly, that it reserves no freedom to itself to be one way or another way, taken together, constitute that utter absence of “range” which is called the singularity, or singleness, of the percept, the one making it individual and the other positive. The percept is, besides, whole and undivided. It has parts, in the sense that in thought it can be separated; but it does not represent itself to have parts. In its mode of being as a percept it is one single and undivided whole.

Let us say that, as I sit here writing, I see on the other side of my table, a yellow chair with a green cushion. That will be what psychologists term a “percept” (res percepta). They also frequently call it an “image.” With this term I shall pick no quarrel. Only one must be on one’s guard against a false impression that it might insinuate. Namely, an “image” usually means something intended to represent, – virtually professing to represent, – something else, real or ideal. So understood, the word “image” would be a misnomer for a percept. The chair I appear to see makes no professions of any kind, essentially embodies no intentions of any kind, does not stand for anything. It obtrudes itself upon my gaze; but not as a deputy for anything else, not “as” anything. It simply knocks at the portal of my soul and stands there in the doorway.

It is very insistent, for all its silence. It would be useless for me to attempt to pooh-pooh it, and say, “Oh come, I don’t believe in the chair.” I am forced to confess that it appears. Not only does it appear, but it disturbs me, more or less. I cannot think the appearance is not there, nor dismiss it as I would a fancy. I can only get rid of it by an exertion of physical force.

It is a forceful thing. Yet it offers no reason, defence, nor excuse for its presence. It does not pretend to any right to be there. It silently forces itself upon me.

I promised to show that a perceptual judgment is entirely unlike a percept. If it be true, as my analysis makes it to be, that a percept contains only two kinds of elements, those of firstness and those of secondness, then the great overshadowing point of difference is that the perceptual judgment professes to represent something, and thereby does represent something, whether truly or falsely. This is a very important difference, since the idea of representation is essentially what may be termed an element of “Thirdness,” that is, involves the idea of determining one thing to refer to another. [—] In a perceptual judgment the mind professes to tell the mind’s future self what the character of the present percept is. The percept, on the contrary, stands on its own legs and makes no professions of any kind.

We know nothing about the percept otherwise than by testimony of the perceptual judgment, excepting that we feel the blow of it, the reaction of it against us, and we see the contents of it arranged into an object, in its totality, – excepting also, of course, what the psychologists are able to make out inferentially. But the moment we fix our minds upon it and think the least thing about the percept, it is the perceptual judgment that tells us what we so “perceive.” For this and other reasons, I propose to consider the percept as it is immediately interpreted in the perceptual judgment, under the name of the “percipuum.” The percipuum, then, is what forces itself upon your acknowledgment, without any why or wherefore, so that if anybody asks you why you should regard it as appearing so and so, all you can say is, ‘I can’t help it. That is how I see it.’

On the whole […] the percipuum is not an absolute event. There is no span of present time so short as not to contain something remembered, that is, taken as a reasonable conjecture, not without containing something expected for the confirmation which we are waiting. The peculiar element of the present, that it confronts us with ideas which it forces upon us without reason, is something which accumulates in wholes of time and dissipates the more minutely the course of time is scrutinized.

There is no percipuum so absolute as not to be subject to possible error.

The percipuum is a recognition of the character of what is past, the percept which we think we remember. The interpretation is forced upon us; but no reason for it can be given.

It is a difficult question whether the serial principle permits us to draw sharp lines of demarcation between the percept and the near anticipation, or say the antecept, and between the percept and the recent memory (may I be permitted to call this the ponecept, a distant and dubious memory being perhaps quite another thing?), or whether the percept is at once but an extreme case of an antecept and an extreme case of a ponecept.

It is a difficult question whether the serial principle permits us to draw sharp lines of demarcation between the percept and the near anticipation, or say the antecept, and between the percept and the recent memory (may I be permitted to call this the ponecept, a distant and dubious memory being perhaps quite another thing?), or whether the percept is at once but an extreme case of an antecept and an extreme case of a ponecept. Or rather, – I beg the reader’s pardon for my awkwardness of statement, – the precise question is not about percept, antecept, and ponecept, but about percipuum, antecipuum, and ponecipuum, the direct and uncontrollable interpretations of percept, antecept, and ponecept.